Discussion Notes for Aristotle's Politics

Sean Hannan Classics of Social & Political Thought I Autumn 2014 Discussion Notes for Aristotle’s Politics BOOK I 1. Introducing Aristotle a. Aristotle was born around 384 BCE (in Stagira, far north of Athens but still a ‘Greek’ city) and died around 322 BCE, so he lived into his early sixties. b. That means he was born about fifteen years after the trial and execution of Socrates. He would have been approximately 45 years younger than Plato, under whom he was eventually sent to study at the Academy in Athens. c. Aristotle stayed at the Academy for twenty years, eventually becoming a teacher there himself. When Plato died in 347 BCE, though, the leadership of the school passed on not to Aristotle, but to Plato’s nephew Speusippus. (As in the Republic, the stubborn reality of Plato’s family connections loomed large.) d. After living in Asia Minor from 347-343 BCE, Aristotle was invited by King Philip of Macedon to serve as the tutor for Philip’s son Alexander (yes, the Great). Aristotle taught Alexander for eight years, then returned to Athens in 335 BCE. There he founded his own school, the Lyceum. i. Aside: We should remember that these schools had substantial afterlives, not simply as ideas in texts, but as living sites of intellectual energy and exchange. The Academy lasted from 387 BCE until 83 BCE, then was re-founded as a ‘Neo-Platonic’ school in 410 CE. It was finally closed by Justinian in 529 CE. (Platonic philosophy was still being taught at Athens from 83 BCE through 410 CE, though it was not disseminated through a formalized Academy.) The Lyceum lasted from 334 BCE until 86 BCE, when it was abandoned as the Romans sacked Athens. e. Aristotle died in 322 BCE, one year after the death of his pupil Alexander had stirred up anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, leading Aristotle to leave the city one last time. f. Aristotle left behind a staggering number of works, of which we have only a small portion now. Still, what we have is not insubstantial. One thing to remember, though, when reading his texts, is that many of them are incomplete working drafts or even lecture notes. The Politics seems to fall into this category. At the very least, it is incomplete. This can create challenges for our own attempts to read an overarching, clearly coherent argument out of its pages. g. Aristotle’s method, finally, builds on the model of Socratic dialectic while also critically modifying it. From dialectic, he takes the procedure of exploring contrasting opinions from both sides, thinking through the consequences of each rather than merely recommending one over the other. But he does not write dialogues to explore matters dialectically. Rather, he does so through thematically oriented ‘monologues.’ And his goal is to use dialectic to work through opinions and beliefs, so that we can ultimately arrive at firm knowledge (epistēmē) founded on first principles (archai). So he doesn’t stop with Socratic questioning, but tries to push further. h. That’s not to say that Socrates, too, didn’t ultimately have some positive claims to make; but his method was more obviously about unsettling opinions, whereas Aristotle’s approach tends to foreground the comparison of opinions so that clear knowledge might be attained and disseminated. Of course, from Socrates we learned 1 Sean Hannan Classics of Social & Political Thought I Autumn 2014 of the dangers of claiming to ‘know,’ and so we should be wary that we don’t simply become Aristotelian sophists, parroting knowledge-claims without first dialectically earning them. 2. The Authority of the Polis a. Aristotle begins the Politics by talking about the different kinds of community organization that structure human life. Such communities exist on every level of social life: there are families, households, religious organizations, and so on. b. But Aristotle takes the polis—the city or city-state—to be the most important kind of community. He does so because the city is the community that aims at the highest kind of good. This ‘good’ will turn out to be happiness, but here we can simply say that the good of the city aims to include and transcend the smaller-scale goods of the families and households that make it up. Because it aims at the highest kind of good, then, the city is the community that has the most authority. (I.i) i. So, we could sum this order of authority up in this way: 1. Community with Highest Authority = City 2. Good with Highest Authority = Happiness 3. Knowledge with Highest Authority = Political Science (the Statesman’s knowledge) c. At the end of I.i, Aristotle briefly introduces us to the method of analysis he will be leaning on throughout: “a composite has to be analyzed until we reach things that are incomposite.” By breaking the city down into its constituent parts, he wagers, we should be able to get a better sense of how cities work and how we might get cities to work well. The same would go for breaking down the overarching category of ‘rule’ into different kinds of ruling and being ruled. 3. The Natural Birth of the Polis a. Before breaking it back down into its parts, Aristotle first builds the structure of a city up from the basics. He takes the city as a product of natural processes, not entirely unlike the growth of a plant or a herd of animals, though of course at a higher level of maturation and sophistication. i. One initial question for us here would be: How does the way Aristotle ‘builds his city up from scratch’ differ from the way Socrates and his companions do something similar? Are they similar approaches with a similar goal? Or are they different in both method and result? b. As part of this political naturalism, Aristotle points out certain natural relationships between kinds of humans. The first two he suggests are male and female (naturally related via procreation) and ruler and ruled. Here, very early on, Aristotle hints that institutions of ruling and even of slavery are not mere historically contingent phenomena, but natural outcomes based on inherent characteristics. As he writes: “For if something is capable of rational foresight, it is a natural ruler and master, whereas whatever can use its body to labor is ruled and is a natural slave.” (I.ii, 1252a) c. Another aspect of Aristotle’s naturalism is his claim that “nature produces nothing skimpily, but instead makes a single thing for a single task, because every tool will be made best if it serves to perform one task rather than many.” (I.ii, 1252b) i. Here too we might ask: How does this singular correspondence of function relate back to the Socratic treatment of specific virtue? How do we get from an individual’s kind of virtue (aretē) to a thing’s task (ergon)? 2 Sean Hannan Classics of Social & Political Thought I Autumn 2014 d. Aristotle next proceeds to give us a speculative natural history of the city. From basic family units come larger villages, which can then cohere into a self-sufficient and organized polis. This, too, is part of nature. Such a city “comes to be for the sake of living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living well. That is why every city-state exists by nature, since the first communities do. For the city-state is their end, and nature is an end; for we say that each thing’s nature—for example, that of a human being, or a horse, or a household—is the character it has when its coming-into-being has been completed.” (I.ii, 1252b.27-34) e. The natural birth and growth of the city is then oriented to the maturation and completion of the city. The other forms of community are already ‘on the way’ to the city as their shared end, goal, or telos. Aristotle’s natural portrait of the polis can thus be called teleo-logical: the city is the properly expected result of an ordered process of natural development. f. It’s not the case, then, that humans just happen to live in big communities we call ‘cities.’ They are actually naturally predisposed to eventually form such cities. It is the natural end-goal of human maturation. That’s what Aristotle is getting at when he says that “a human being is by nature a political animal.” (I.ii, 1253a) g. A human person who, by nature, was in no way suited to the polis would then be either subhuman or superhuman, either a beast or a god. h. The other reason that Aristotle gives for calling humans ‘political animals’ is that only we have speech in the proper sense. For him, speech does not consist in simply sharing information about pleasure or pain. He calls that kind of sonic communication ‘voice,’ saying that even animals share information with each other in that way. i. Speech, on the other hand, goes beyond pleasure and pain to communicate about the beneficial and the harmful, which Aristotle holds parallel with the “just” and the “unjust,” as well as with the “good” and the “bad.” While animals communicate basic sensual data, then, humans give each other normative accounts of the other. Political speech in the city is simply the natural outgrowth of that process. i. Here we could ask whether Aristotle’s comments here unsettle the Socratic notion of the ideal city as a community of shared pleasure and pain. Would that kind of community still be too ‘beastly’ for Aristotle? j.

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